SAFESHIP: Situational Awareness and Forecasting Encounters for Sailing Harbors by Intelligent Planning

Safe piloting in busy ports by autonomous USVs is a highly challenging problem. SAFESHIP provides a fully autonomous harbor piloting solution by judiciously combining robust perception and sensor fusion with an innovative constrained path planner and a mature threat detection and alerting system which will completely replace the current manned solutions. Safe operation will be achieved using SSCI’s mature performance evaluation tool in combination with on-water tests to provide and evaluate safety metrics at the design stage and justify autonomous decisions to a remote operator. SAFESHIP path planning will be compliant with COLREGS rules for operation in ports, while the resulting software will be compliant with UMMA and MOSA standards. SSCI has assembled a strong team to support the design, data collection, performance evaluation and transition of the SAFESHIP to operational platforms of interest by the Navy.